


In Good Hands

by newisalwaysbetter



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Emotions, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Flynn needs help, Healing, Kissing, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Touch Aversion, Touch-Starved, cuteness, injuries, yes both
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-23 21:51:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18558577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newisalwaysbetter/pseuds/newisalwaysbetter
Summary: Flynn doesn’t like hands, but he can deal with hers, like this. They look small and soft in his callused ones, and no man Flynn has ever fought has worn sparkly blue nail polish.(After a request for some touch-starved PTSD Flynn. Fluff, emotions, and mild angst abound. Set S2/S3.)





	In Good Hands

**Author's Note:**

> Set S2/S3; warnings for all the sad stuff of Flynn’s life, including mentions of death, injury, weapons, violence, restraint, unspecified trauma, and general PTSD-type behaviors including touch aversion.
> 
> This is a prompt fill; if you like it, come send me requests at to-hell-with-oblivion on tumblr :)

Flynn doesn’t like hands.

Hands, in his experience, poke and pinch and shove and slap. Hands have wrapped around his wrists, his jaw, his throat. Hands have stripped and frisked and cuffed him, and quite frankly Flynn has had enough of _that_ for several lifetimes. Hands can hide knives, hold guns, shatter fragile fingerbones. It’s far safer, Flynn has learned, to stay well out of reach.

It wasn’t always like this, of course; Lorena was always patiently thoughtful with him, and Flynn would never have turned down a chance to hold his little girl. But his men afterwards had been selected for their efficiency rather than their people skills, and prison had hardly helped the situation, and he’d been too stricken with grief to take any of the other opportunities presented to him, with the inevitable result being that no one has tried to touch Flynn softly in some three years.

All of which is impossible to explain when, the first time Lucy reaches for his face, he shies away like a kicked dog.

He reads the surprise in her face. It was only an innocent touch, after all, intending to examine the nasty bruise covering much of his face and most of the color spectrum. They’re even in public, more or less, and it’s not as though Flynn really expects Lucy to go for his eyes here in the common room of the bunker. It was not so very long ago, however, that any touch between them would have been on the edge of violent. As a matter of fact, it’s only in the last month that they have graduated to the perfunctory touch of dragging each other out of danger. Flynn can handle that, can even compartmentalize the shrieking aversion long enough to carry Wyatt to safety for some three hours on their latest mission. But later he scrubs his skin raw under the warm spray which is the closest thing he can stand to human warmth, desperate to strip away the  _touch_  still clinging to him like slime.

It could have something to do with Lorena, he supposes, in the rare moment he indulges in the illusion of a future. How she touched his face as she died.

He could never go back to them like this, he knows. Even if by some miracle history were to change in his favor, his girls deserve someone who can bear to hold them properly, not someone who avoids mealtimes because brushing hands while grabbing a plate still sends an electric shock through him, or who has bled through his bandages more than once while waiting for the bathroom to empty, so that no one will offer to touch his broken body.

(Not that he expects them to, exactly, but better not to give himself the hope. He tells himself it’s a good thing that Wyatt and Rufus don’t clap him on the back like they do each other, and that Lucy reaches for Wyatt when she’s afraid. He tries not to stare at Rufus and Jiya cuddled together on the couch. He tries not to want what died with the last of his family.)

In the moment of it, Lucy recovers swiftly, and withdraws her hand so quickly that Flynn almost thinks he’s imagined it. “I’ll…get you some ice.”

“Lucy.” Flynn overcomes his instinctive shudder long enough to get his hand on hers and squeeze. “It’s not you. You know?”

“I know,” she says, in that light way that sets his alarm bells ringing.

The dreams, when they come, always begin with the promise that her touch would not hurt. Each time he realizes a little more quickly that he’s dreaming, as gentle hands trail over him in the darkness. Flynn waits hazily for his brain to scream  _no touch,_  and as expected, a police siren wails in the distance. As it grows louder, Lucy’s grip locks like a vise around him, and pain blossoms along the trail of her fingertips. He surfaces with his eyes screwed shut, trying to stay under for just one more moment, because the only thing worse is waking alone.

Flynn learns exactly how much pride he has left when he humbles himself and asks Denise to buy him gloves. She must know that his functioning hangs in the balance of her silence, because she purses her lips, and nods.

The gloves help, a bit, and Flynn takes to wearing them around the bunker, even if he has to ignore Rufus and Wyatt’s jabs about baby-soft hands. Hell, it’s an improvement over his first three months of enduring Wyatt “accidentally” bumping into him at every opportunity. (Under better circumstances Flynn would have put a stop to that quickly and brutally, and he had wanted to, but he understands his tenuous position here all too well. Wyatt orbits closer to their sun, and his greater gravity means that any significant impact threatens to cast Flynn off entirely, and send him spinning irreversibly into the cold darkness.)

Lucy, by contrast, is supernova; she envelops and suffuses him, and the kiss, when it happens, temporarily blinds Flynn to the fact that she stands over him in a bedroom of a filthy bunker, her hands wrapped around his face. 

Then a finger brushes his throat, and Flynn’s chest tightens. 

He holds out for her as long as he can, but as  _the soldier_  Lucy’s hands  _pin him to the wall_  pull him close, his breath stutters. Lucy must mistake it for enthusiasm, because her lips curl against his, and she  _slaps_  cups his face with one hand and whispers something but Flynn just hears  _get the cuffs on him._

Flynn snarls reflexively and jerks out of her hands. Lucy pulls back, her eyes wide, and Flynn wants to say it’s all right but he has never lied to her to make it easier, and he's not about to start now. Instead, he buries his face in his hands. “I’m sorry.” He offers it over and over. “ _I’m sorry._ ”

Lucy doesn’t try to touch him after that, and it hurts but he’s glad. His own touch is the only kind that doesn’t make him squirm, and that makes an awful kind of sense; he’s been inhuman long enough to know it.

When he looks up, Lucy’s wiping her mouth. After a minute, she says stiffly, “Do you trust me, Flynn?”

Flynn swallows. It’s not the question he expected, but he’ll answer it as truthfully as he can. “I want to.”

“Okay,” Lucy says, like that’s it, and Flynn waits for the fatal blow. He waits so long, in fact, that he’s distracted from his own spiral long enough to really see her. He’d assumed from the silence that Lucy was thinking, but as he observes the patient lines of her face, he doesn’t hear the wheels turning. And as they watch each other, Flynn realizes with a sudden lightness that she’s waiting for him to calm.

“ _Okay,_ ” Lucy says again, and takes a deep breath, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I am willing to try this with you, but I need to know the rules.”

The rules, as it turns out, are easily accessible to Flynn from years of avoidance. He makes them coffee while he explains it, and Lucy carefully takes the cup without brushing his fingers.

Unless it’s a mission or one of them is in danger, no unexpected touch. No getting his attention with touch unless absolutely necessary. No touching his neck or wrists under any circumstances. No touch during a panic attack. No kisses. No holding hands.

Nothing he can give her, Flynn thinks, but doesn’t say it out loud.

“One more,” Lucy says. The first coffee has long since gone cold, and Flynn sits on the bed, watching her at work brewing their second. “If you’re at all uncomfortable, you have to tell me, right away.” Flynn wets his lip, uncertain. “I’m serious. I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want whatever part of you thinks I will to get any traction.” Lucy selects four sugars and empties them into Flynn’s cup, then approaches him, her gait sure. 

It takes everything Flynn has not to shy away when she lifts the cup to his lips. That hand is too close; it would be all too easy for it to smash the cup over his head, throw the coffee in his face, drop the cup entirely and punch or poke or… 

“I’m not going anywhere,” Lucy promises.

The coffee is extra sweet, just how he likes it, when he finally gulps it down.

They start slow like that, on Lucy’s insistence. Flynn is afraid that if he were allowed to take the reins, he might run them off the road, just for the sake of getting it all over with quickly. Still, he really does want to try, not because he really believes it will change anything, but because Lucy does. 

The discovery that he can touch her hair safely is a revelation. He’s hesitant to do so, at first, having seen too many hands fisted there, but Lucy teaches him to put it up for her before they go out on missions, and for those few hours, Flynn’s mind is quiet while he pushes and shoves and sweeps the team out of danger. Afterwards, Lucy lets him take it down, and sits by his side while the day’s touches shudder out his taut body like vibration along a string.

That leads them to explore putting the focus he applies to her hair to good use. It’s a small luxury, but Lucy procures a bottle of nail polish, and Flynn manages to keep the panic at bay long enough to paint her fingers with messy, trembling strokes. 

Flynn doesn’t like hands, but he can deal with hers, like this. They look small and soft in his callused ones, and no man Flynn has ever fought has worn sparkly blue nail polish. He’s just finished the first hand when he hears her sigh.

“I realize that it’s…clinical, but I have to ask.” Lucy huffs a wet breath. “You know that I wouldn’t hurt you, right? I mean, consciously, you _have_ to know.”

“I do, for you. No one else,” he says, because it’s true. “Though it does help somewhat that you’re not tall enough to reach.”

Lucy scoffs, and while that does screw up his next stroke, Flynn does believe that he’s getting better.

He graduates to holding her hand, albeit with gloves. The others have stopped talking about it. When the gloves become an impediment to his polishing technique, Flynn takes them off, and they don’t go on again. 

He stops bleeding through his bandages alone, because now Lucy knocks on his door after every mission and wordlessly instructs him to take her hair down. It requires a mirror to do properly, so he’s finally forced to join the others in the little bathroom-turned-hospital, slinking in like a vampire avoiding the sun. No one speaks to him, and no one tries to touch his wounds, but Wyatt leaves the gauze and tape in Flynn’s lap when he’s done, and that hurts a little less.

Flynn catches a glancing bullet to the side the next time they go out, and Rufus manages to stitch it up without laying a finger on his skin. During the week Flynn is bedridden, Lucy paints his fingernails a jaunty shade of sparkling blue. 

(He doesn’t have the words to thank her for using the words he doesn’t have.)

Flynn makes his peace with fingers slowly. Hands can push and grope and claw and cling, yes, but they can also hold a hairbrush; a paintbrush; four sugars. The first time strange hands put clothes onto him instead of taking them off, he comes undone in the best way. No one touches him like Lucy does, but also it’s no longer true that no one touches him. Wyatt picks the lock on his cuffs without hesitation. Rufus hands him back his gun. Jiya tugs on his sleeve.

Flynn has known this was possible, on some level, but he had forgotten how to believe it until then, until them, until  _Lucy_.

The first time she holds him, he cries.

It is exactly as he dreamed it, and so much better, because this dream does not go dark. Lucy’s head nestles safely in the hollow of his chest, and her arms around his waist are feather-light, and he knows in that moment that she could never hold him tight enough that he would hurt from it. And while he still fears for Lucy, putting her hair up that morning is like a promise.  _I’m not going anywhere_ , she says again, and that night, there are no dreams. They’re no longer necessary.

He’s in good hands.


End file.
